Abstract

What constituted early modern consciousness? This is of course a question of constitution or of constituent parts, rather than of a whole. To the early modern ear, the universe of meanings associated with the words 'cognition,' 'conscious,' and such were intricately bound up in an elemental worldview—of a universe in which all wholes were comprised of combinations and distributions of parts. While it may be desirable within a particular literary tradition to want to credit Shakespeare with the invention of the modern conscious human mind, this chapter will situate Shakespeare’s language within its historical milieu and, specifically, within Elizabethan theatrical practices. Cultural histories of distributed cognition in the early modern theatre, as in the work of Evelyn Tribble, have revealed the extent to which these theatrical processes operated using collaborative cognitive artefacts, but I will go further here to claim that what we now view as artefact was at the time every bit the 'piece of work' that was actor and stage. It is no coincidence that so many of the speeches in which the nature of the human are presented in Shakespeare are also heavily meta-theatrical. I will argue that the theatrical processes we now know to have been widely used in early modern staging, such as parts scripts, cues, plots, were not simply the products of a contingent economy of the theatre—they are practical expressions of the early modern conception of human consciousness as the bringing into constitution of always fragmentary, distributed pieces of work.